Chicago Whip 1922

What is our responsibility? This was the title of the speech Mrs. Loraine Richardson Green speech gave at the St. Mark’s Lyceum in March 1922. This event, meant to take place on the following Sunday, was mentioned in the March 25, 1922 issue of the Chicago Whip. Mrs. Green obviously felt her responsibility was serving […]

The National News: A Trade Unionist Newspaper

The National News was created by editor Carl E. Person after the shutdown of the Strike Bulletin in May 1915. National News began publication only a few months later in October of that year. Person was a famous labor activist who had been put on trial in 1914 for shooting a strike breaker and was later acquitted on the basis of self-defense. Much […]

The Illinois Issue and the American Issue: Powerful Forces in Prohibitionist Politics

The Illinois Issue was a weekly newspaper created in January 1906 for an audience of prohibitionist readers. The Illinois Issue was centered in Chicago, IL, and published in Downers Grove, IL. In February 1912, the Illinois Issue ceased production. Starting in July 1913, the Illinois Issue merged with a weekly national publication called the American Issue. Both papers were organized by a political group called the Anti-Saloon League. The American […]

Vandalia Whig and Illinois Intelligencer: An Early Illinois Newspaper

The first newspaper in Illinois, the Illinois Herald, was founded as a weekly publication in 1814 based in Kaskaskia. It soon became the Western Intelligencer and carried the title Intelligencer in one form or another for the rest of its existence. The town of Kaskaskia was the Illinois Territory’s capital until 1818 when it became the state capital after Illinois […]

The Strike Bulletin: A Chronicle of a Failed Strike

The Clinton (IL) Strike Bulletin began publication in April 1913. The Strike Bulletin was a weekly paper marketed to labor unionists in the railroad industry. It was published from Clinton, Illinois for the entirety of its run. The Strike Bulletin was the creation of a labor organization called the Illinois Central System Foundation and was edited by Carl E. Person. Person was […]

The Universalist

The Universalist (Chicago and Cincinnati, 1884-1897) was a religious newspaper published near the end of the nineteenth century, a century when religious newspapers proliferated alongside the denominations they documented. Denominationalism was a distinctive feature of the nineteenth century American religious landscape, and European observers frequently remarked upon it, usually attributing the phenomenon to religious disestablishment. […]

The National Prohibitionist

From 1907 to 1911 the National Prohibitionist was the official organ of the Prohibition Party, an influential “third party” of the Progressive Era. The Progressive Era produced at least twenty “third” parties, and the Prohibition Party was among the more influential, certainly the most enduring. The newspaper was formed by the consolidation of multiple Prohibition […]

Newly Digitized Immigrant Newspaper: Irish Republic

The Fenian Brotherhood, a secret society of Irish nationalists, founded the Chicago Irish Republic in 1867. At the time, Chicago had the fourth largest Irish population in the United States and was considered a “hotbed” of militant Fenianism: for example, in 1864 the Chicago Fenians tried to declare war on England; in both 1865 and […]

The Daily Worker: A Communist Newspaper out of Chicago

The Daily Worker was created for Communist Party USA members in 1921. The paper was originally titled the Worker, centered in Chicago and marketed as a weekly newspaper for the first three years of its existence. It then moved to New York City and carried out a pre-planned expansion into a daily broadsheet with a […]

A Twentieth Century Church-State (in Illinois)

Zion City was a utopian religious community founded in July 1901 by John Alexander Dowie, an evangelical minister and pioneer of Pentecostalism in the United States. Dowie emigrated from Australia in 1888, and eventually settled in Chicago where, in 1893, he established a ministry near the World’s Columbian Exposition. Central to Dowie’s ministry was the […]